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[PTTG??]

By adding syndromes that are generally helpful, and allowing them to be applied to plants and foods, then players could easily create such things as plants that ease nausia or perhaps animals that produce meat which makes dwarves stronger. I also imagine that more exotic, semi-magical abilities, such as a breed of goat with healing milk or booze that sends dwarves into rages with increased fighting power and toughness- or even mysterious plants with seeds that can be ground and brewed into a potion that supplants the need for sleep- would also be possible.

Such a change would be a quite simple way to add quite a lot to the game.

[Internet Kraken]

I would like this as well. I had the idea to make a creature that released a healing gas, but found that there were no beneficial syndromes whatsoever. That doesn't surprise me, since the system was made for the purpose of doing horrible things. It would be a nice addition though.

[NW_Kohaku]

There's been several threads like this since 2010... I remember Toady saying he was intending to do things like this, I think maybe from the Talk #9, but I'm too lazy to go searching for it myself.  (Someone's even got it in a quote of theirs...)

[Kattaroten]

Does anybody remember that quote?

I think it was rainseeker "So you broke out in hiv but you can run REALLY fast" or something like that

[Footkerchief]

There's been several threads like this since 2010...

Yep:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61477.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=54648.msg1175685#msg1175685

I remember Toady saying he was intending to do things like this, I think maybe from the Talk #9, but I'm too lazy to go searching for it myself.  (Someone's even got it in a quote of theirs...)

This one?

Capntastic:   So what about herbs and plants being turned into potions?
Toady:   I guess hopefully it would all fall under the same umbrella; it's not chemistry per se, you're not trying to give names to the things, but stuff turning into other stuff that has effects ... We've got the poisons now which are the only example of a material having an effect, and the effects are all over the place even know; they can make you cough blood, give you blisters, cause your body parts to swell up and get compartment syndrome, give you fevers, make you dizzy, and that's a material effect that effects a creature through contract, injection or inhaling the object and so if you start to give beneficial effects or more neutral effects, maybe give it a few more ways that cause the syndrome to trigger - it could just be something that's nearby rather than something that's inhaled or injected - and then all of a sudden what was a really practical grounded real world poison system becomes a system for doing all kinds of fantastic things. So if your herbs, if you say one plump helmet and one newt eyeball is a reaction that you can do in a workshop with an empty flask, and then you use the to container thing that we've got now for reactions to say all that stuff goes into a new liquid in that container called plump helmet newt eyeball juice or something. Then you can define a new material and that material could have whatever properties you want. So the pieces are in place now to make poisons, but you wouldn't be able to do anything with them unless you somehow found a way to get the poison out of the container ... which you could do, if you find a way to heat the thing up, like dropping it in magma and then it turns into a gas you could have creatures nearby inhale. So you could actually set up some kind of poison gas traps, even in the new version. But just in general things like a potion that makes you happy ... there are two obstacles there now in the current system. One of them is that you'd need to have the effect, you'd need to give the modder or vanilla modding control to change the happiness of a dwarf, so it's not just giving blisters or whatever but there's a new effect, and that list is just going to increase over time and hopefully cover the basis. The other problem is to get a dwarf to actually use the thing; to recognise that there's now this flask filled with this juice that when you drink it it makes your happiness one hundred and fifty percent for a week, and having the dwarf know that that's something that needs to be used is a large problem, especially for a modding situation where you make happiness juice that gives you blisters and makes you fly ... when do you drink it? I don't know, it sounds like an adventure mode thing; the adventurer would take that journey, but not necessarily a dwarf craftsman that's feeling a little bummed out. So that's another issue with modding, but it's not that far away now, you can mod in your own poisons and create them and boil them to make them work now and we just need to expand the effects and give things a few more uses.

Toady also commented on this in the old List thread:

TL;DR: Alcohol and drugs should be weak poisons, poison effects should be created for them should be usable by creatures, poisons should be turned into general substances and allow positive effects as well as negative.

Yeah, I alluded to this in my dev notes on the 2nd -- poison effects are already just "creature interaction syndromes" on the material.  That I don't have ingestion yet is the main barrier to doing alcohol, and as I add in positive effects, everything else would work out (of course there'd need to be AI and jobs and so on to use things for whatever purpose).  The framework is in place, it just needs to be used for more things.  It can also be extended to things that have nothing to do with materials, though for that change a bit more would have to be done to syndrome indices.  I think I mentioned "gaze" attacks there, though at some point you have to worry about a proper extension to the full "magic" framework, which is something to be more careful about.

[Josephus]

Does anybody remember that quote?

I think it was rainseeker "So you broke out in hiv but you can run REALLY fast" or something like that

Acquiring AIDS does not sound like a fair tradeoff for increased speed.

Unless you mean "hives".

[Rowanas]

Does anybody remember that quote?

I think it was rainseeker "So you broke out in hiv but you can run REALLY fast" or something like that

Acquiring AIDS does not sound like a fair tradeoff for increased speed.

Unless you mean "hives".

What if you could run like The Flash?

[NW_Kohaku]

Footkerchief: Hmm... thanks for that, it actually makes me think of something I should put in the FoTF thread, about getting dwarves to do more complex actions...

EDIT: Oh, hey, and I saw who had the quote, again, it's Untelligent.

Toady:   Yeah we can add more poison effects. I'm sure people will look forward to having positive and negative effects in syndromes added.
Capntastic:   Can you not even just mix them? So like 'yeah you broke out in hives but you can run really fast'.

[Medicine Man]

Does anybody remember that quote?

I think it was rainseeker "So you broke out in hiv but you can run REALLY fast" or something like that

Acquiring AIDS does not sound like a fair tradeoff for increased speed.

Unless you mean "hives".

What if you could run like The Flash?

Unless you could run from your slow horrible death, no.

[Josephus]

Does anybody remember that quote?

I think it was rainseeker "So you broke out in hiv but you can run REALLY fast" or something like that

Acquiring AIDS does not sound like a fair tradeoff for increased speed.

Unless you mean "hives".

What if you could run like The Flash?

Unless you could run from your slow horrible death, no.

Wait, he's right. The Flash has literally outrun death, so this is feasible.